Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), citing Senate rules that prescribe for certain decorum from senators while speaking on the floor, suggested that if Reid didn’t apologize, the Senate should further examine his remarks.

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“I invite him to come forward, I’m confident that my friend the junior senator from Texas would promptly accept his apology,” Lee said.

“My friend from Texas is like the schoolyard bully,” Reid said Monday night. “He pushes everybody around and is losing, and instead of playing the game according to the rules, he not only takes the ball home with him but changes the rules. That way no one wins except the bully who tries to indicate to people he has won.”

On Tuesday, Reid also called Cruz the “very junior senator from Texas,” an apparent dig at his newness in the chamber.

For his part, Cruz didn’t ask for an apology, but said that he wasn’t a bully and added the statements were proof the majority leader wants to raise taxes.

“The Senate is not a schoolyard,” Cruz said, repeating his initial response to Reid’s remarks. “Setting aside the irony of calling somebody a bully and then shouting them down when they attempt to respond, today I intend simply to commend my colleague from Nevada for his candor.”

The name-calling comes as senators continue to fight over the whether or not to take the budget to conference.

Tuesday, Republicans — led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — cited the debt ceiling as their answer to Democrats who say the GOP is refusing to conference the bill with the House. They say the Democrats are trying to include a hike in the debt ceiling, which is set to expire sometime this summer, in the reconciliation bill.

“It’s a little more complicated than it sounds,” McConnell said. “The majority leader likes to talk about regular order. The main point here is we don’t feel that we ought to enable the Democrats to produce an outcome that raises the debt ceiling without doing anything about the debt or raises taxes.

“So we have a sort of, should I say, a pre-conference discussion going on about the parameters of that conference — and hopefully at some point we can figure that out,” he added.